Dinner Speech - Nancy Campbell: Looking for the Bee Without the Sting: The Global Search for an Ideal Analgesic

The quest to find an ideal, non-addictive analgesic provided a new model for the social organization of science in the early 20th century United States. Relying on German expertise in alkaloid chemistry, the quest began in 1929 and continues into the present. The history of the attempt to find the “bee without the sting” is a history of opiate pharmacology—but it is simultaneously a social history that has to do with cultural narratives about pain and pleasure, addiction and freedom, and judgments about who uses drugs and why they do so.